Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

4.4 Exploited genres
Unit 4 Recognizing genre
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

Once genres are established in our patterns of expectation, they lend themselves to quotation and creative adaptation, and can be mixed, merged and manipulated. Such secondary use of genre categories takes a number of forms, but the two most common are collage and pastiche.

4.4.1 Collage and pastiche

In collage, different genres (or features of different genres) are placed alongside one another and thus are implicitly joined together. Such collage can be used, as it commonly is in modernist texts, to set up a dialectic, or process of contrastive judgement that results from the juxtaposition of different voices or quoted texts. (See Unit 12, Juxtaposition.)

Pastiche (along with other sub-genres, such as burlesque, mock-epic and mock-heroic) is similar, insofar as it undermines or offsets a seemingly authentic speaking voice by bringing different styles together. But it does so by clearly signalling the element of imitation - especially incongruous imitation - generally by merging conventions from one genre with subject matter from another.

Both kinds of genre mixing or genre layering are common techniques in satire, whether in print, film, or radio and television comedy sketches. In the case of collage, something in the text - or in our expectations - signals that we are to respond to one of the genres in the compound as more powerful or convincing than the other(s). That genre undermines or displaces those other genres or genre features, and so implies an often critical comparison anchored in the values carried by the dominant genre. In pastiche, tension between the subject matter and the generic conventions followed indicates the satire, which can be directed either towards the form adopted or the topic (for discussion of techniques in satire, see Simpson, 2003).

Ironies created in this way are not always controllable, however. Genre combinations sometimes escape from authorial control, and can leave the text an open-ended dialogue between voices it has juxtaposed, with no stabilizing, dominant voice to confer a fixed point or meaning (see Unit 11, Irony and Unit 14, Authorship and intention).

4.4.2 Postmodernism and genre

When generic compounding and formulaic imitation bring a text’s genre directly into the foreground, and make irony or implied comment on the genre a dominant or continuous aspect of the text, they create one major dimension of postmodernism.

Roughly, postmodernism is a response to a set of cultural conditions believed to characterize the contemporary period. As viewed in postmodernism, our exposure to language and media so saturates social experience that any act of communication inevitably involves a high degree of self-awareness of the genres in which communication takes place. In most situations, selfconsciousness about the means rather than the content of communication - about the range of conventional forms available for representing things - is played down. What makes a text postmodern is that, rather than just trying to communicate its contents to you, it draws attention to the modes of writing

and reading that are in play, often undermining them by doing so. This kind of postmodernist effect is seen mainly in texts that use the sorts of collage and pastiche technique outline above; but such effects can be found in texts written or produced before the rise of postmodernism, too, by looking for traces of juxtaposed styles, moments of uncertain register, or incongruities between topic and adopted form. (A Romantic poem, for instance, might be approached not as an expression, in apparent good faith, of its author’s spirit but as a text pondering its own creation as an example of the Romantic poetic genre.) In most postmodernist readings, the notion of genre is foregrounded; and many contemporary thinkers suggest that you can only read a text in a culturally postmodern framework by reading its complex relationships to a history of other texts (see Unit 13, Intertextuality and allusion).